The bromantic wedding comedy is a fairly reliable comedy subgenre; but it is also one that requires a great deal of care. Producing a comedy about weddings can be something of a minefield; it is very easy to play into the familiar gendered stereotypes the controlling fiancée or the disengaged husband-to-be. The Wedding Ringer is an addition to the rapidly-growing subgenre that focuses on a stereotypically masculine perception of “the big day” – wondering what the groom makes of festivities.
The Wedding Ringer comes packed with awkward gender truisms. At one point, professional best man Jimmy Callahan (head of “TBM – The Best Man Inc.”) is confronted by his assistant Doris Jenkins. Doris explains to Jimmy that male and female relationships work differently; that it is tough for men to acknowledge emotion and to connect with one another. This is perhaps the most dialogue that The Wedding Ringer affords any female character in any one scene.
“Weddings are for the woman,” Jimmy assures his client, Doug Harris, in one scene. It seems like a stock stereotype that the movie is setting up to subvert – that Jimmy and Doug will eventually learn (in a “knowing is half the battle” sort of way) that marriage is a two-person enterprise that becomes shared at the moment of union. Instead, The Wedding Ringer never shifts its position. The Wedding Ringer sticks to its guns, hitting all the plot beats that one might expect from a movie espousing that philosophy.
Kevin Hart works the material as best he can, and The Wedding Ringer works best when it allows itself to drift from its central premise. However, it is weighed down by a clunky script and a decidedly mean-spirited world-view.
A comedy with a set-up like The Wedding Ringer will inevitably have some homoerotic subtext. At its core, The Wedding Ringer is a film about a guy having to choose between his wife and his new male best friend. However, there is something quite uncomfortable about the lengths to which The Wedding Ringer will go to assert its aggressive heterosexuality. The film is careful enough to include a prominent gay supporting character, serve its biggest homophobe some poetic justice, and even photoshop Jimmy into a gay wedding, but these feel like token gestures.
Instead, the movie feels quite awkward about its central dynamic. Early on, Jimmy institutes a strict “no hugging” rule to minimise contact with his clients; the rule remains in place even as Jimmy softens to Doug. Instead, man-on-man contact is treated as a stock joke when it turns out that Doug is a smooth dancer. More than that, the script convolutes the narrative to provide both Jimmy and Doug with paper-thin female love interests by the end credits, as if to assure viewers that this is a bromance, not a romance.
Then again, these faintly uncomfortable attitude towards the homoerotic subtext is just one facet of The Wedding Ringer‘s decidedly mean-spirited outlook. The female characters barely register. Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting and Olivia Thirlby do their best with shallow roles, but they exist to provide clear plot functions. Doug’s fiancée is not so much a character as a looming disaster that he needs to escape. Jimmy’s suggestion that a wedding is a one-sided affair is endorsed by the script.
The Wedding Ringer conspires to make Gretchen Palmer into something of a villain – a character who seems incredibly self-centred at best and brutally passive-aggressive at worse. Given that the very premise of The Wedding Ringer involves Doug lying through his teeth to the woman he plans to marry (and her family), the script contorts awkwardly to align the audience’s sympathies in the desired direction. While Doug has hired himself some mercenary friends, at least they appear to harbour some affection towards him.
To be fair, The Wedding Ringer could easily play as a subversive satire of these stock gender and sexual stereotypes. If the viewer strains hard enough, The Wedding Ringer could be seen as a bitter twist on many of the conventions of the wedding comedy. However, The Wedding Ringer feels just a little bit too earnest. As crass and as juvenile as the film gets (and it gets pretty crass and juvenile) there is a sense that The Wedding Ringer really believes at least some of what it is saying.
It feels like The Wedding Ringer is almost trying to make what it sees as an important point, with the occasional emotive and quiet conversations between characters and expressions of frank sincerity. The very set-up of The Wedding Ringer might paint Jimmy and Doug as manipulative con artists, but the film prefers to see them as tragic heroes. There is an interesting movie buried somewhere within The Wedding Ringer, but it would require a lot more nuance than the script can provide.
It is a shame, because there are points where The Wedding Ringer comes close to working. The Wedding Ringer works best when it moves away from hackneyed gender stereotypes and more towards broad farce. The script perhaps tries to get too many laughs from the sight of Josh Gad falling over, but a montage of staged friendship photos is light and breezy (and, in places, clever) enough to work. Similarly, the beautifully overstated montage of lies that reveals the origin of Jimmy’s alias as “Bic Mitchum.”
When The Wedding Ringer is welling to cast itself free from its central moral point, it becomes reasonably enjoyable. There are a few too many stock “wedding” gags; it seems like the script runs through a veritable check list of wedding clichés – the gay wedding planner, the hilariously excessive bachelor party, the socially disastrous wedding reception, the awkward sporting confrontation with the father-in-law. And yet, despite this set up, there are moments where the film is quite funny.
Most of these sequences involve allowing Kevin Hart to cut free. One such highlight is a collection of short cuts of Jimmy trying to find the voice of “Bic Mitchum”, stitched together from a variety of takes. Hart has an incredible comedic energy and relentless enthusiasm that shines through whenever he can escape the awkward set-up of the script around him. The Wedding Ringer never manages to find the right chemistry between actors Kevin Hart and Josh Gad, but it is easy to see that the film could have worked much better.
The Wedding Ringer is a mess of a film, one that feels a little too earnest for all its crude humour.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: film, Josh Gad, kevin hart, Movie, non-review review, review, the wedding ringer |
the m0vie blog 
Thanks for the review!
Maybe its me but having gotten increasingly used to the ‘female slacker’ subgenre in recent years (Bridesmaids, Bad Teacher et al) there seems something, not so much offensive, but weirdly outdated about these kind of films that present men as lovable goofs and women as… not.
Yep, there’s something quite transparently uncomfortable about the women in The Wedding Ringer. It’s weird, because you can see the ending coming a mile away, thinking “they can’t possibly follow through on this, can they…?” and then they do.